The most personal film by Guillermo del Toro is also among his most frightening and emotionally layered. Set during the final week of the Spanish Civil War, the tale of a ten-year-old boy who, after his freedom-fighting father is killed, is sent to a haunted rural orphanage full of terrible secrets. Del Toro effectively combines gothic ghost story, murder mystery, and historical melodrama in a stylish concoction that reminds us that the scariest monsters are often the human ones.

"What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? An instant of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber." So says Casares, but ten-year-old Carlos disagrees. Thanks to the Civil War, Carlos his arrived at the desolate Santa Lucia School, now a makeshift shelter for war orphans, where an unexploded bomb rests in the courtyard. More frightening are the odd things keep happening to Carlos - he sees strange shadows, hears voices, and at night he is being visited by the "One Who Sighs."